Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)

An R&D firm I know is constantly spinning low volume prototype designs with wildly different BOMs; they treat Arrow reps like North Korean spies.

But another crank-turning design firm I know trusts Arrow to do BOM reviews because of how many times they’ve come through with a reel of hard-to-find parts, making a design manufacturable in a pinch, unlocking sales.

The exact same Arrow rep serves both firms, I’ve never figured out why he is treated so differently.

Tariffs would have helped 20 years ago, but here they're basically just a wistful dementia echo of something that could have been. Applying a policy that's decades out of date merely further strangles American industry. This article is a great example if you actually examine the details of the situation - Digikey is an input to the types of domestic manufacturing that actually employs labor, yet blanket tariffs simply make them even less competitive.

I lived through Walmart systemically walking through the Midwest and destroying every bit of competition in its path. People looooooved to talk about how other people should “just pay $5 more!” to a local retailer and stuff made in the USA. But it was always for other people to do. Never underestimate the American consumers cheapness. If they can get more junk for less, they will do so nearly every time.

And this was in an era when there was still a large amount of manufacturing done in the US. The costs would no longer just be a minor 20% discount - they would be multiples since we lost both the capital investment in equipment and factories, the supply chains feeding them, and would have to spend a generation training up current high schoolers into skilled and semi-skilled manufacturing labor. Assuming anyone actually is willing to do those jobs these days.

Buying local became something for performative rich folks to do. Everyone else excused themselves due to “need” of some sort. Consumer preference was revealed and catered to - and now without severe great depression level pain it’s not coming back.

Your comments in this thread basically come across like you just read an economics 101 textbook and are now asking leading questions to continue your study. In reality, markets are computationally hard and path/structure dependent. Merely tweaking a few knobs to increase some incentive won't make something magically spring into existence. A lot of market "proponents" ironically miss this - if markets were not computationally hard, then centralized planning would also work!

I think this is a bit short sited. Many parties are interested in building weapons that cause lots of harm. And not everyone who is interested in making weapons has countries backing them, in fact they likely have countries against them building said weapons. Hence the needed work around to try and source parts from Mouser.